Saturday, May 21, 2011

The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality


The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
By Richard Panek
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 297 pgs. Nonfiction

We live in a surprising universe--only 4% of which we can see. Astrophysicists made startling discoveries in the 1990s and Panek reports these discoveries as well as several decades of astronomy leading up to the "discovery" of dark matter and then "dark energy."

Panek is focused on story of the science here and ventures seldom into anecdotes about the people involved. His style and approach reminded me a lot of Dennis Overbye's The Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, which chronicled the developments in physical and theoretical astronomy up through the 1980s. The 4 Percent Universe nicely extends this history into the most recent developments.

SML

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